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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

My Favorite (Mostly Free) Cooking Apps for the iPhone

I'm not exactly a Luddite, but I'm also
not one for jumping at every new technological gimmick that hits the
market. That's why it took me awhile to acquire a smart phone. I was
perfectly content with my old stupid phone. It made phone calls. What
more did I need? My wife finally dragged me into the 21st
century when she got an iPhone a couple of years ago. I started
playing with it and within hours I was at the phone store buying one
of my own. Among the big selling points for me was all the cooking
apps with which I could junk it up. And there are hundreds of them.

Cheap bast.....errrr.....thrifty person
that I am, I tend to gravitate toward the freebies, but there a few
worth purchasing. Here are a few of the apps I've tried.

Naturally, I have some Italian-specific
apps. The best of these is Mario Batali Cooks! At
$9.99, it's also the most expensive. Mario had a big hand in the
creation of the app, which contains lots of his favorite recipes from
all over Italy along with some great instructions on technique. Lots
of video and still photography, food and wine pairings, a glossary of
terms, and much more. It's a keeper.My
other favorite Italian food personality, Giada de Laurentiis, also
has an app. It's a freebie, but you kind of get what you pay for.
Don't get me wrong, Giada is
a nice app. There's just not much to it. A handful of recipes, a few
short video tips, and Giada's Twitter feed. Oh, and a cute
pronunciation guide in which my dearest Italian goddess mispronounces
“asiago.” For some
odd reason, she says “ah-SAH-gee-oh.” Tried
the app and, sad to say, dumped it.Fabio
Viviani has a nice app. Called Let's Cook, it's
a big sucker. It's free, but make sure you're on a wi-fi or you'll
devastate your data minutes downloading it. Like Mario's app, it's
got lots of step-by-step video instructions and a ton of static
recipes that are very intuitive and easy to follow. Fabio imparts
some helpful cooking and entertaining tips, and there are menu
suggestions and wine pairings and other neat features, too. I use it
a good bit.I'm a
subscriber to La Cucina Italiana magazine,
and their basic La Cucina Italiana US app
is free. It's not the most comprehensive app I've ever seen, but I
refer to it from time to time. You can search recipes by course, by
prep time, by cooking method, or by season. You can store your
favorites and set up your menu. There's also a shopping list and a
timer. It's worth the phone space.Two
other Italian apps that I have on my phone are iCuoco and
one that displays as Flavour, but
is actually Il Cucchiaio d'Argento or
“The Silver Spoon.” iCuoco is
free Il Cucchiaio d'Argento is
$1.99. Both are excellent apps with lots of recipes and helpful
features. But both are written in Italian, so don't go there unless
you can read Italian or are in possession of a good translator
program. I'm always amazed when I read through the reviews to find so
many clueless individuals who are angry or upset because they
downloaded the app and discovered that something called Il
Cucchiaio d'Argento was all in
Italian! Gee. Ya
think?On the
general cooking front, I'm also a dedicated reader of Cook's
Illustrated. They've got an app.
The freebie is pretty limited. It's got a fair number of good open
recipes in various categories, but you have to be a subscriber to
access the “members only” recipes. Same thing with the “taste
test” section. One or two open testings in each category with a
“members only” section at the bottom. This one's also got a place
to archive your favorites and a shopping list feature. It's still on
my phone, but not one of my “go to” apps.I've
got four “go to” apps: Big Oven,
Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner, Epicurious, and
The Betty Crocker Cookbook. If
you can't find it with one of these, it's not going to be found.The Betty Crocker Cookbook is
a freebie with more than 13,000 recipes that come fully loaded in the
app. If you know what you want to make, you can search by recipe. If
you just want to see what you can come up with using ingredients you
have on hand, you can do that, too. There's a recipe box to store
your favorites and a shopping list feature. You can sync your recipes
and grocery lists across different devices. You can e-mail them to
friends, and you can even access coupons.Epicurious is
another great app. It, too, has loads of recipes available and it
allows you to save your favorites and create a shopping list. One of
my favorite aspects of Epicurious is
its timeliness. As I'm writing right now, it's Spring and Easter is a
couple of weeks away. When I open Epicurious, the
home page displays Easter, Passover, and Spring recipes right up
front. And there are recipes for kids, low- fat recipes, low-carb
recipes, low-cal recipes and recipes designed for people who can
“cook like a pro” as well as for those who “can barely cook.”
The app itself is free and there's an in-app option that allows you
to sync your recipe box for $1.99.The
Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner is
a winner. The free version does a lot, the $2.99 version does a
little more. With the freebie, you can search among more than 40,000
recipes. You can search by ingredient and you can search by
nutrition. You can bookmark your favorites, create shopping lists,
e-mail recipes to friends, and share them on Facebook and Twitter.
There's a built-in grocery scanner that lets you scan barcodes and
searches for recipes that use the scanned items. The “spinner”
feature is a lot of fun. There are three tiers; dish type,
ingredients, and ready in. Select, for instance, “main dish” from
the first tier, “beef” from the second, and “slow cooker”
from the third, and the app brings up a huge selection of slow cooker
beef recipes.An app
that comes highly recommended by almost everybody is Big
Oven. It's a free app with
access to over 250,000 recipes. You can search recipes by keyword,
course, or ingredient, and you can browse popular recipe collections.
If you need to be inspired, the app lets you enter up to ten
ingredients from your fridge or pantry to get meal ideas. You can
scale recipes, convert English to metric, and share your recipes by
e-mail, Twitter, or Pinterest. There's also a menu planner for
special occasions and everyday meals. I guess that's why it's had
more than seven million downloads.One of
my most indispensable cooking apps is free and doesn't contain a
single recipe. Published by Portable Knowledge, LLC, it's called
Cooking, and it is a
treasure trove of culinary knowledge. I can't begin to describe how
useful this app truly is. Want to know how many slices of bacon
you'll need to crumble to get a half-cup? Look in the “Yields and
Tips” section. Don't have any chicken broth on hand? Find out how
many bouillon cubes or how many teaspoons of granules or dried
poultry seasoning you'll need in the “Substitutions” section.
What's a “chinoise?” Look it up in “Terms.” Ever wonder what
the volume of a Number 10 can is? Twelve cups. It's in the
“Commercial Can Sizes” subcategory under “Measurements.” And
if you need to know what to do when cooking at high altitudes,
Cooking has you
covered. It's a great little app.Equally
indispensable is a free app from the Escoffier Online International
Culinary Academy folks, published by Futura Group. The Escoffier
Cook's Companion will knock your
socks off. Touted as “The ultimate Cook's Companion for the
kitchen,” it really lives up to the hype with a range of tools that
include a measurement converter, a compendium of ingredients, a
glossary of culinary terms, a comprehensive list of kitchen
equipment, and a versatile kitchen timer. The converter is easy to
use, the glossary is fun and informative, and the compendia (yes,
that's the proper plural of “compendium”) are awesome. I love the
timer feature, though, because you can have more than one going at a
time. If you're preparing three different dishes, you can set up
three separate timers. Very handy.

I also
have something on my phone called Kitchen Dial. It's
a quick and easy converter that let's you select a metric or English
amount and convert it to its other equivalent. Select “ounces,”
dial it to 1 ½ , then select milliliters on the other dial, and you
get 44.4. Saves me a lot of calculation time. It's a little more
comprehensive than the Escoffier converter.

I've
got some recipe scalers and food cost converters on my phone, too. In
fact, I had to separate all my cooking apps into twofolders on my home screen
because they wouldn't all fit into one.As I
said, there are a mind-numbing number of cooking apps available. I
just entered “cooking” into the App Store search box and got
3,541 results. “Italian cooking” racks up 815. “Recipes”
will net 4,100 and “kitchen” will get you 1,272. I think you'll
like the dozen that I've covered here, especially my four “go to”
apps and my two “utility” apps. Look 'em over and see what you
think.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)